Why am I being asked for this information?

As a regulated financial services company, we are required to identify our customers to ensure compliance with applicable laws and keep our platform safe for customer use.  These requirements are an essential part of preventing fraud, managing risk, and protecting our platform against use for money laundering, terrorist financing, and other unlawful activities.

Once you have submitted this information and that information is verified, you can continue to send money between currencies, countries and friends. If we need to review this information further, your account will be sent to a queue to be reviewed by our Account Services team, who will review your account and get back to you over email as soon as possible.

Why me?

Some customers have provided all of this information, while others have only provided partial information. To ensure compliance, consistency, and maximum account security, we are asking all of our customers to provide this additional information at this time. Those pieces of information are instrumental to verifying a customer’s identity, but if we are still having trouble doing so, we might request additional information in-app, including a government issued photo ID and a selfie image.

I’ve been a customer for a while. Why now?

Circle is constantly working to improve our compliance processes, which enable us to meet our obligation to “know our customers” under the federal Bank Secrecy Act. To that end, we are legally required to obtain and verify certain identifying information from all of our customers.  This enables us and our regulators to ensure that we are providing our customers with a secure and compliant way to send and receive money.

What if I don’t want to provide this information?

If you would like to continue using Circle to hold a balance or send and receive funds, we will need to verify your identity.  We highly encourage every customer to provide this information to maximize account security and to ensure that you are the one authorizing transactions made using your account.